


jeg dømmer ingen (wallaahi)

by Fandine



Category: SKAM (TV)
Genre: Gen, Islamophobia, Muslim Character, Racism, Sana-centric, bi!Sana
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-05
Updated: 2017-05-05
Packaged: 2018-10-28 12:04:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10830915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fandine/pseuds/Fandine
Summary: On the way back home from school—elementary school, she’s either in second or third grade—baba tells her about Yawm al-Qiyāmah. About how the ground will crack and flaming lava will erupt. About how lightning will strike and everyone will collapse, will fall dead. About how everyone, those who die that day and those who died million years ago and who were already buried, will rise, their bones lifting and their skulls turning so they face the sky. Yes, them,us, we will all go to Allah for judgement.She doesn’t know what judgement means, but Sana knows she’s afraid.





	jeg dømmer ingen (wallaahi)

i. On the way back home from school—elementary school, she’s either in second or third grade—baba tells her about Yawm al-Qiyāmah. About how the ground will crack and flaming lava will erupt. About how lightning will strike and everyone will collapse, will fall dead. About how everyone, those who die that day and those who died million years ago and who were already buried, will rise, their bones lifting and their skulls turning so they face the sky. Yes, them, _us_ , we will all go to Allah for judgement.

She doesn’t know what judgement means, but Sana knows she’s afraid.

From that day onward, Sana spends as much time with her feet off the ground as she can afford, for fear of the sudden erupting lava. She becomes an avid climber, climbing the highest trees she can and finding the thickest branch to sit on, only to sit there for hours, simply kicking her legs in the air underneath. She can sit there for silently for a whole day, switching between staring at the ground and the sky, watching it—

 

 

 

ii. Mama tells her if anyone asks, she should say she’s a vegetarian. She’s 9 and she’s going to a birthday party, the present laying heavy in her hands. She grins, because Helene is going to love the present, absolutely _love it_. She picked it herself, pointed it out for mama, a white face staring at her from behind a see-through plastic box, her eyes blue and clear and framed with flowing blonde hair. It’s a bust, just a head and shoulder, meant for little girls to put make-up on and play hairdresser. Mama looks at the box, smiling softly, but her smile become weird when she looks closer at it. And then she sighs.

“Habibti,” mama says. “It’s very expensive. Maybe something else?”

But Sana is nothing if not stubborn, and she plops right down, sits there on the floor in the middle of the toy store, not budging. Other customers look weirdly at them, and Sana notices but doesn’t think closer about it, because she wants _that_ doll. Helene is the girl in school everyone wants to play with, even people from the older grades. She’s the one who gets flowers from the boys, and although Sana doesn’t want anything from boys, it would be nice to get flowers, even when the flowers were actually plucked from the garden of the abandoned house across the school yard, where people lived, which is actually _illegal_ , Helene says, giggling behind her hand and putting her face behind the flowers. Helene is the one people want to swing with, the one people want to draw with, the one people invite home to play after school.

It would be nice, Sana thinks, to be that wanted. So Sana figures that she’ll give Helene the best present, and maybe then, Helene will want Sana to be seated next to her on table when they sit for the birthday dinner.

Sana’s so stubborn that she’s now sitting on the back of mama’s car, with the doll wrapped in colorful gift wrapping paper and ready in her hands, almost bouncing in her seat in her excitement, when mama tell her to say she’s vegetarian if they serve meat. A vegetarian, mama tells her, is a person who don’t eat meat.

“Why?” Sana asks when she understands what vegetarian means. “I eat meat with you.”

“Because they usually serve swine. Pig meat,” mama tells her. “And we don’t eat that, remember?”

Sana nods because she remembers the story mama told her. About the pigs. That pigs were actually once terrible human beings that were turned to animals by Allah as punishment. "And we don't eat that, right, Sana?" mama tells her with a laugh. And at the birthday party, she tells Helene’s parents just that when they go around serving the kids sausages and soda, and they give each other a look, a look Sana doesn’t understand but she notices anyway. She knows it’s not the first time she’s seen that kind of look directed at her or her family, but she doesn’t understand, not even now, so she lets it go. They smile at her and tell her they’ll call for some pizza without meat, and Sana has to smile back and try not to cry for how embarrassing it is to sit at the end of the table, at the opposite side of Helene, with everyone already laughing and talking and eating their pig sausages all the while Sana has to wait for something that wasn’t prepared for her.

 

 

 

iii. Oslo, being the capital city of Norway, is the most diverse place in this damn fucking cold country. It’s here the Pakistanis, the Somalis, the Arabs, the Sri Lankan Tamils, the Filipinos, generally all the immigrants, gather. The Norwegian policy, her mamma tells her, is initially to spread all the immigrants and refugees Norway receives all over the country, so that they can integrate to the Norwegian culture and learn the Norwegian language faster.

But the heart wants its home, and home is not a place, but a feeling of belonging, and her parents packed their bags in Tønsberg and moved to Oslo, where they could hear people casually break into Moroccan Darija and eat Turkish or Arabic food in the restaurant around the corner.

Mamma and pappa, they decide to reside on the West side though, paying three million kroner more to get an apartment in a nice, white neighborhood. Because although they want to be near home, they don’t want their children to be exposed to the… less glamorous side to the city, to the less salient environments where _the failed immigrant children gather and sell drugs and steal phones._

“Or so I’ve heard,” Kari Nordmann says and smiles sheepishly. Sana feels her cheeks burn, whether of embarrassment or anger, she doesn’t know, maybe a mix of them, coupled with a heavy dose of shame laying heavy in her stomach, like she just swallowed something whole without chewing it properly, like an entire apple or maybe a box. She imagines there’s a white-faced doll with blue eyes and blonde curls inside the box. “Not to be racist or anything,” Kari Nordmann assures the rest of the girls sitting around her, “but it’s true there’s more trouble down there, right?”

The other girls chuckle and then they pack up their lunch boxes, finishing their slices of bread with brown cheese on top, as they move on to their classes, as if nothing happened, as if it's just a normal day at school, and it is, it really is, Sana thinks, as she looks out at the hallways, at the back of the heads of all the students walking by, all blond heads or light brunettes.

She and Kari Nordmann and another couple of girls walk through Grønland, the east side of Oslo, one day later, and there’s suddenly a guy in front of them, walking straight towards them as he talks distressingly to someone standing behind them, he’s saying, _are you okay? Don’t ever do that to me, I was so afraid something happened to you, you’re okay, right, habibi, please don’t go any place without me again, okay?_

Kari Nordmann puts her hand to her chest afterwards and says, “That was so scary. He was outright yelling, like, I thought he was going to do something to us. Who just starts yelling like that?”

Sana says, “He wasn’t yelling.”

Kari Nordmann says, “Huh? What did you say, Sana?”

Sana says, louder, “He wasn’t yelling. He was just talking to his son, who he thought he lost on the streets. He was obviously distressed, but he wasn’t yelling.”

Kari Nordmann looks surprised. “Oh. I forgot… You understood what he said?”

Sana says, “Yeah. It was Arabic.”

Kari Nordmann nods like every secret in the world opened up for her. She says, “Ah, that explains it. You know how Arabic sounds just, naturally aggressive, right? Like you’re all angry when you talk.”

Sana doesn’t answer, doesn't say that technically her family speaks Darija at home, but she stops calling her parents mamma and pappa and starts saying mama and baba again, and she can’t wait for middle school to end so she can choose which high school she’ll go to, and leave Kari Nordmann behind.

 

 

 

iv. Ramadan the last years were horrible because it feels like the days in Norway never ends, even down in Oslo. Well, almost. Daylight’s gone around 23.00pm and comes around again at 04.00am, but it’s worth it. At the end of the day, the whole family gathers and they eat delicious food from another home country that Sana has never seen, but she knows how the home country smells and tastes and feels, and when she goes back there again, she knows she will recognize it.

Herman looks at her with a crooked smile, something like shocked glee in his eyes. Sana just told him, when he asked why she wasn’t eating over the lunch table at school, that she isn’t eating because she’s fasting until daylight’s gone.

“You can’t even drink?”

“Nope,” Sana says, letting the ‘p’ pop in her mouth. So what if she’s a little proud of how she can do it? Sue her. It’s not a small feat, to resist eating in the summer when everyone’s going around slurping on a slush or an ice cream, and still she stays focused most of the day.

But Herman doesn’t see it that way, because he laughs and says, “Wow, that’s kinda like a fucked-up eating disorder.”

 

 

 

v. Noora is the picture-perfect definition of Kari Nordmann, not just blonde hair, but _yellow,_ framing a white face with blue and clear eyes.

Sana glances at her and dismisses her as irrelevant as soon as her gaze slips away from her. But then Noora says, “If she’s joining, so am I,” and when she puts her name and number in Sana’s phone and Sana sees she spells her name as “Noora”, Sana blurts out, “What kind of pretentious parents spell their kids’ name like that? Two o’s? Why not just Nora with one o, like every other Nora? _Why?_ ”

Well. Noora only blinks at her, throws her head back, and _laughs_.

But Noora is still Noora, still mindful, still beautiful Noora, that fits every ideal in this cold, cold country, and even though she is mindful, she’s also privileged.

Sana can’t even remember what Noora says, just something about being Muslims and Norwegian, and how they were different, and it was just casual talk, just a slip of a tongue, it has happened a hundred times before, it will happen a hundred times more after that, it's a mathematical equation with no limits, but still.

But still. Sana thought she could at least put Noora at a higher standard than that.

In the end, Sana doesn’t say anything, just walks away from the conversation.

 

 

 

(There’s a knock on the front door later, and Elias goes up to take the door. He comes back and says it’s for her, with a smile and a wink she doesn’t care to analyze. Sana opens the door, and Noora appears, blinking back at her, but she isn’t laughing, or smiling; her face is somber, a twist in her mouth that exposes her nervousness, her eyes unusually bright. She says, “Sorry.”

When Sana doesn’t answer, she says, “It was wrong, what I said.”

“I’m sorry,” Noora says after another pause. She takes a step back. “I can go.”

Sana sighs and shakes her head, holding the door a little more open. “Come in. We’re eating, but we can plate for another person.”)

 

 

 

vi. She knows she has too much pride sometimes, that she doesn’t want to admit that she’s wrong because the world she grew up in saw her black hair and brown skin, and then her black hijab and brown skin, and seeing that, the world poked at her, trying to find faults in her, because she looked _wrong_ between all these fair-skinned and blond people, so the world wanted to see if they could prove it, prove that she didn’t fit.

So she put her head up, and said, _no, i’m right_ , and she always made sure she was, to the best of her ability.

But then she falls in love with a beautiful boy whose smile warms her heart and makes her palms a little sweaty, whose laughter make her inevitably smile because it’s so _weird_ but still so endearing, who likes loud children and even louder football and sweet coke and ridiculous bandannas, and here we are.

 _Here we are_ , she thinks, her mind still reeling of shock, edging on the hysterical, here we are.

She stares at the phone, at the text reading, _jeg er ikke muslim_ , and it’s like he just pushed a hand through her chest to grip tightly around her heart and _squeeze_.

 

 

 

vii. “Do you think I’m going to hell?”

Even and Sana are sitting outside, on the stairs leading up to Grace’s apartment, enveloped by the night, the music and cheers from the party inside beating insistently against their backs. There’s no stars in sight, the light pollution from the city killing all of them and leaving only the lamp posts as cheap substitutions. 

Sana turns to watch the side of Even’s face at his question. “What?” she says. “For drinking? Then everyone at this party is going to hell.”

Even laughs, but it sounds bitter, all sharp edges cutting open his throat. “No. You know why.”

Sana shakes her head and says, “I don’t know. I don’t judge.”

Even opens his mouth again, but Sana cuts him off with a hand. “I don’t know, Even, I don’t judge, and if anyone else judges you and say that—what you said, that you will go to hell, that you don’t deserve anything else—then they’re talking shit. They have no right, you hear? No right.”

Even blinks, before nodding slowly, raising his bottle towards Sana with a smile, saying, “Thanks.”

But Sana knows the difference between Even smiling genuinely and Even faking it, and he’s totally faking it, so she doesn’t answer his smile, just looks him in the eye and makes sure to enunciate her next words carefully.

“Even,” she says. “Allah made you as you are, and Allah doesn’t make mistakes. No human being is haram. If you don’t believe me, believe in that, at least.”

Even’s smiling now, softly, at the ground, so Sana chooses to believe he does. She believes it, she thinks. She has to believe, every time she looks at Noora and notices how her eyes crinkle when she smiles, how her hair tickles against her cheeks when Noora sometimes puts her head on her shoulder, how the warm feeling running through her body is akin to what she feels when she hears Yousef’s laugh, observing how his hair falls in front of his eyes, how he moves across the room, towards her—

Sana had asked once, a long time ago, when her height still hadn't reached up to Baba's elbows and she had to tilt her head back to look up at him, how Allah could keep count of everything a person had done, both good and bad. He had told her that it's because when a person stand in front of Allah, their mouth would automatically open and recount everything the person had said. Their ears would recite everything the person had heard. The palms of that person's hands would face upwards and tell Allah everything the person had done with them.

And Sana thinks about how it feels sometimes, to accidentally brush her hand against Noora's, to see her walking towards to Sana across the school grounds. She imagines her lips brushing against hers and how that would feel; a feeling of warmth and adoration amped up ten thousands times. And Sana asks herself, how could Allah ever have meant for something so beautiful and so good to be haram?

She takes a deep breath. “Even,” she says and in the corner of her eyes she sees him turning towards her, his face questioning. But she isn’t looking at him. Instead she look at the dark maroon sky, as she says, “I think I like girls—”

 

 

 

viii. Baba laughs when she tells him what he told her so long ago, about Yawm al-Qiyāmah.

“I probably shouldn’t have told you that,” he says while he laughs, a little sheepish.

Sana raises her eyebrows. “Baba, I was like, eight. _You think?_ ”

She smiles at him over the dinner table as he continues to laugh, the sound filling their home. Mama is out at the mosque, preparing something for a presentation about Islamic art with her colleagues, and who even knows were Elias is. They’re alone at home, sharing a vegetarian pizza between them, which they called for after they decided they couldn’t bother making something.

“Don’t tell your mother,” baba said, and Sana put her hand to her heart and said solemnly, “Wallahi.”

“My father said the same thing to me,” baba says now. “I probably should have thought closer about telling it to a child though."

“But you understood what I meant by it, right?” baba says. 

Sana hums. “Eventually. I think.”

“Yes? What do you think it meant?”

“Only Allah judges.”

 

 

 

i. —watching the sky for hours, and that's the reason she sees, as the sun sets, how the sky can turn to some of the most incredible and brilliant colors she'll ever see.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. The clip released on 05.05.2017 was really upsetting to me because SKAM has now officially made all of their Muslim characters appear as homophobes, or have at least spouted homophobic comments. [This post](https://unromansapphique.tumblr.com/post/160343364810/skam-and-the-depiction-of-islam-homophobia-in) discusses and highlights the problematic issues with Skam's portrayal of homophobia within Islam. With that said, I actually wrote the entirety of this fic before the clip was released, and when it was, I contemplated not publishing the fic, but then I decided to do it anyway, obviously. Idk, I wanted to show that there are in fact lgbt Muslims and those identities aren't magically separated as many people seem to believe.
> 
> 2\. Yawm al-Qiyāmah is the Arabic name for the Day of Judgment. The title is in Norwegian and translates to "I judge no one (wallaahi)". "Jeg er ikke muslim" means "I'm not a muslim."
> 
> 3\. No one is named Kari Nordmann in Norway. It's a nickname for the average Norwegian citizen, and also the female personification of the Norwegian population. The male equivalence is Ola Nordmann. "Nordmann" means Norwegian, or literally translated, "northern man".
> 
> 4\. Comments and kudos are much appreciated! <3


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